


Bathrobes, Hair Dye, and Advanced Miniaturized Technology

by hufflepirate



Series: Teenage Girl Avengers AU [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - All Female, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Dress Up, Gen, Halloween, Halloween Costumes, Teenage!Girl!Avengers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 07:41:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5120426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hufflepirate/pseuds/hufflepirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Teenage!Girl!Avengers AU.  Sequel to "Morning Mayhem," but you don't need to have read that one to get this one.</p><p>It's Halloween, and our 6 favorite teen ladies are getting ready to head to a very public party on their own rooftop.  There's a lot of pressure on all the Avengers to keep up appearances, but at least they have each other for support.</p><p>Wow, that's super vague.  I'm not really sure how to summarize this fic.  They're getting dressed up in their costumes.  It's cute.  I think it's cute, anyway.  And then it gets serious a little.  But maybe still funny serious, I hope.  If you read it and like it and think 'heck yes I can summarize this' be my guest and I might post yours instead, with my thanks of course.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bathrobes, Hair Dye, and Advanced Miniaturized Technology

Cleo straightened the lapels of her red bathrobe and flicked her head to the side, flipping her short hair, dyed temporarily black for the occasion, back up out of her eyes.  She wished she could carry a martini glass, but Steph had been _very_ clear.  They were all under the legal drinking age, and no one at the Avengers' rooftop Halloween party should even _look_ like they were drinking.

She sighed, squashing her straw cowboy hat onto her head. Toni always threw one hell of a party, but with the media around, they couldn't ever quite let their guards down. She liked it better when Nat and Pepper threw warehouse parties on the sly, though even then, Steph usually hovered around the door ready to get them out of there with their image intact if the cops showed up.

Most of the others were still getting ready, but Brooke, who never left anything to the last minute so that she wouldn't get stressed out by the chaos when it got here, was sitting calmly on the couch, feeding pizza rolls to Lucky.  The dog had been decidedly unhappy to be dressed up as a chameleon earlier today, but now that there was pizza to be had, he seemed to be making the best of things.

Cleo grinned at Brooke.   "You and Liz ready to go, Ms. Frizzle?"

Brooke laughed, wiping her hands on a napkin as Lucky ate the last of the pizza rolls and then smoothing down the skirt of her handmade dress.  The atomic hazard symbols interspersed among the green lines meant to be gamma rays ought to remind everyone at the party not to piss Brooke off, not that it was usually necessary these days.

"I think so," Brooke answered, "As ready as we're gonna be.  I'm glad you brought Lucky home even though Toni said no pets.  It's gonna be good to have him around.  As long as he's chill with all the people, and he usually is."

"That's my excuse, sure!" Cleo said. She didn't regret rescuing Lucky. And everyone else loved him too. Even Toni, who rarely called him anything but "that stupid pizza dog," had eventually come around.

"Anyway," Brooke replied, "It'll help with my costume to have him there.  I just couldn't stand how _itchy_ that wig was!"

"Mine too," said a voice behind Cleo. Nat was, as usual, a knockout. Usually when they dressed up, she wore black dresses instead of white, so they wouldn't show dirt if she ended up in a fight, but Halloween was hardly a time for practicality, so there she was, with a plunging neckline and a flowy skirt and all of it in white, to match her big white earrings.  She was adjusting her short blonde wig, feeling around its edges to make sure there weren't any loose strands of red peeking out.  "But you look great without yours anyway."

Cleo smiled.  "Thanks.  I might have dyed my hair and put it up, if the red would have taken. Mine's too dark, though."

Nat wrinkled her nose.  "I'm glad you didn't.  That's what's taking Steph and Thora so long in the bathroom."

Cleo rolled her eyes.  "Well, and the styling stuff for Steph, too, I'm sure. Just because she used to see the showgirls putting their hair up in fancy waves and things doesn't mean she actually has any idea what she's doing."

"I heard that, Barton!" Steph's voice said from the bathroom, "And I'll have you know I'm almost done, so you can just stuff a sock in it!"

Cleo forced herself not to laugh. Steph was clearly irritated, which meant that, as usual, she'd bitten off slightly more than she could chew, and didn't want to admit it. 

Nat rolled her eyes affectionately. "I'll come help," she said loudly, so she could be sure Steph would hear too.  "Cleo just doesn't know how hard it can be when you've got long hair..."

"Why do you think I keep mine so short?" Cleo answered, "I _totally_ know how hard it can be."  She paused for a moment, "And anyway, why can't she just shove it all up into her rain hat?"

"Because that's not how she _wears_ it!"

Steph's answer was almost drowned out by Nat's sudden gasp.  "Thora what did you _do_?"

"It is, I am willing to admit, a bit of a mess-"

Brooke smiled fondly, waving toward the door as she said, "You know, I think Steph's just putting extra pressure on herself because we've already done so much work on the costume.  When she asked me if I could teach her to make one, I don't think she realized how much harder her dress was going to be than mine. All those pleats at the bottom, and all."

Cleo snorted.  "Yeah, you guys watched that clip so many times I'm pretty sure even _I_ was singing "Good Morning" in my sleep by the end of it."

Brooke hummed in agreement.  "But at least it was fun.  I mean, no offense, but none of the rest of you are patient enough for it to have been fun."

In the bathroom, Nat was still telling their resident Asgardian off.  "Thora, that's not a 'bit of a mess,' that's a _disaster_! You were supposed to be dying your hair, not the bathtub.  And you could have asked for help, you know.  Did you at least keep it off your costume?"

There was an awkward pause, awkward even from this distance, before Thora answered, "The costume is also dark, so it does not show too badly."

Cleo snorted, "Oh, no offense taken, dude. There's no _way_ I'd have done that project.  Repurposed bathrobes are way more my speed. And dye in my _short_ hair."

"Give yourself _some_ credit, though," Brooke said, "Hawkeye going as Hawkeye? That's pretty good."

Cleo wasn't sure what to say to that. She'd never been much good at taking compliments.

"Well, I can help you with _some_ of the cleanup, but you'd better keep your mess off my dress," Nat answered, sounding resigned.

"And mine!" Steph chimed in, as if the rest of them _didn't_ know how protective she was of the thing.

Nat ignored her. "And I guess we can clean the tub later.  Let's just work on getting as much of it off your skin as we can."

Cleo snorted, "I'm just glad _one_ of our brilliant ideas was actually pretty easy. It's gonna be a miracle if Nat keeps that dress clean."

"That's ok," Thora observed in the bathroom, "No true warrior princess would ever return from battle without a little dirt on her."  She was answering Nat, and probably hadn't even been listening to Cleo and Brooke talking, but Cleo took it as confirmation that she was right anyway.

"See, Thora agrees with me."

"She does not," Brooke answered affectionately, "Nat will be _fine_."

"Yeah," Cleo agreed, "she will. And our two not-so-blonde-as-usual bombshells sound about ready, too.  Any word on our fearless leader in all things party-related?"

Brooke shifted slightly in her seat, as if she were uncomfortable, "Yeah, I don't know.  She ditched her costume late last night and said she was gonna make a new one."

Cleo's eyebrow shot up, "She's not going as Betty Boop anymore?"  Cleo had always thought Toni's plan to go for maximum sluttiness with minimum Steph-being-able-to-complain-ness by picking something both sexy and old enough for Steph to remember it was a little short sighted. Especially because, while Thora hadn't picked the skimpiest of Xena costumes, her long-legged proportions made the skirt seem even shorter on her than it really was, and Steph hadn't batted an eye. But that didn't mean she'd expected Toni to switch costumes so late. "What's she doing instead?"

Brooke shifted in her seat again. "I'd rather not say."

Cleo usually hated answers like that, but Brooke was the one person actually allowed to give them, so she just settled back onto the couch with a sigh, to wait for the others.  She really did _prefer_ the collective Avengers entrance they always made to having to go up to the party alone, or at least, she did once she was doing the entering.  The waiting was never very much fun.  It just made her nervous, and she felt silly being nervous about something that was supposed to be enjoyable.

It was a relief when the other three came out of the bathroom, Steph first, with her yellow raincoat open over her blue and white dress with the pleats she'd redone three times, and then the other two a minute or so later.  Thora mostly looked put-together, and was in such good energy that you really _did_ believe the last few dye smudges on the side of her neck were from fighting some fierce opponent.  Nat was, miraculously, still spotless, and with a haughty air that suggested she'd heard Cleo's doubts and proven her wrong, but refused to actually say so.

Then they waited for Toni.

"You know," Steph said absently, playing with the bows around the ankles of her blue, heeled Mary Janes, "I thought she was gonna be a really cute Betty Boop."

Nat snorted, "We know.  That's probably why she changed it.  Trying to get a rise out of you."

Steph rolled her eyes, "Why does she keep trying to do that?  I _remember_ the Ziegfeld Follies, even if only just. It's not like I've never seen-"

But then the door to their private Avengers-only elevator dinged open, and Steph fell silent.

Toni stepped confidently out of the elevator wearing very little of something that Cleo couldn't quite wrap her head around.

"Did you know," Toni proclaimed as she walked toward them, "That if you google our names and then "costume," you get a bunch of weird versions labeled "sexy"? As if we weren't sexy already! And as if that was what we worried about while we were saving the world!"

The rest of them sat there silently for a moment, taking in the full sweep of Toni's costume, or at least of what there was of it. Cleo wasn't sure how she was walking in heels that high, couldn't tell if the metal bits around her waist were meant to be shorts, or a skirt, or just iron panties, and couldn't quite figure out how the top of the outfit was actually holding both Toni's arc reactor and her breasts, in spite of the fact that it somehow had both what looked like corsetry and what looked like straps and neither seemed to be doing any real, practical work.  It covered her nipples, but Cleo wasn't sure how it was doing that, either. The heels weren't part of actual boots, but she was wearing spandex leg warmers in a shiny red fabric over top of them. Her gloves started off like her normal ones, but then extended upward to her elbows.

"I took the sexiest bits of all the costumes," Toni continued, "And I blended them together. Only mine, you know, _works_."

Cleo opened her mouth and then shut it again.

"Yeah, for how long?" asked Nat skeptically.

"Let's hope we don't have to find out," Toni answered, "On the plus side, some of the new miniaturization techniques I worked out last night are definitely gonna be the building blocks for some cool new things.  And next year I might be Betty Boop who _flies_. With a garter that shoots _repulser beams_. But I won't be _me_."

"Can I, uh-" Cleo interrupted, "Can I just ask _why_ , though?"

"Yes, Toni, that armor does seem impractical. It-" Thora added, sounding uncertain.

"Doesn't it?" Toni agreed, a vicious edge creeping into her voice for the first time in a while as she interrupted Thora. "I thought so, too.  But then I thought - what the hell.  I can probably make it work.  Prove to them I can. Then when I blow the goddamned thing up at the end of the night and go back to my real suit, it'll really _mean_ something. Now let me go touch up my lipstick and we'll go look ridiculous in public."

Cleo couldn't help but admire Toni as she came out of the bathroom again wearing fierce red lipstick and charged up the stairs, not looking twice at the others, but assuming they wouldn't let her go out there alone.

They didn't.  In fact, they stuck closer to her than they usually did at parties, staying in the limelight instead of slinking away to the shadows. Steph made a point of looping her rain-coated arm through Toni's periodically in a show of solidarity.

And the show at the end of the evening, when Toni slipped away down the stairs and came back to the roof in her usual suit to blow the costume to fragments in the air over the city was just as good as watching fireworks.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this! I think the girls are really fun to play with, so I thought I'd write them when some costume inspiration struck. Since I didn't spell all of them completely out, here are the costumes if you were confused.
> 
> Cleo - Benjamin "Hawkeye" Pierce from M*A*S*H  
> Brooke - Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus  
> Lucky - Liz from The Magic School Bus  
> Nat - Marilyn Monroe  
> Steph - Kathy Selden from Singin' in the Rain  
> Thora - Xena, Warrior Princess  
> Toni - Sexy Iron Lady


End file.
